Elizabeth has had her driver’s license for less than a week, and she has already been in an accident: she stopped for a pedestrian, and another car rear-ended her—at the VERY PLACE where I have MANY TIMES complained (not here, but in the realm of life where people can hear me audibly vocalizing) that other drivers will assess the situation before their eyes and immediately decide that there is NO OTHER REASONABLE CONCLUSION than that you (I) must be a GIANT IDIOT who has stopped for LITERALLY NO REASON, as people apparently FREQUENTLY DO in their imagination, and so they will ROAR AROUND YOU (me), sometimes HONKING in a way they believe to be communicative—and thus end up NEARLY FLATTENING THE PEDESTRIAN YOU WERE (I was) STOPPING FOR. Or, in this case: they will end up driving into the back of your (Elizabeth’s) stopped-for-a-pedestrian car, denting the corner clean inward but neatly missing the tail light, and then leaping out and apologizing profusely and calling themselves an idiot and saying they totally see how the entire thing was their fault, and that they are so sorry, and are you (Elizabeth) okay, and that they tried to stop but their stupid truck skidded on the wet road, and here is their insurance information. (Elizabeth, trying to give her insurance information, showed her HEALTH INSURANCE card. She said the other driver “was, like, ‘…No’.”)

Elizabeth is fine and the car is fully driveable (the trunk even opens/closes, though with effort), and it seems obvious to everyone involved that she was not at fault, and in fact the whole situation could not have put her in a more glowingly righteous light (could any accident be more pure than “rear-ended while stopped for a pedestrian”?)—but MY GOODNESS did it send me into a spiral. The! And the! And also the! And all my worst! And what if the! And so forth!

Paul took Elizabeth down to the police station to see if there were things she was supposed to do after Not Calling the Police to the Scene, and, as part of that conversation, the officer advised us to get things started by calling OUR insurance company rather than the other driver’s: the officer said the insurance company “gets paid the big bucks” to handle these things for their customers. So I contacted them. Now I am feeling stupid because there was no reason OUR insurance company even had to KNOW about this. AND WHAT IF THERE ARE CONSEQUENCES OF THAT. And also I am now twitchily waiting for their promised follow-up phone call, and wondering if there will be uncomfortable questions such as “And do you have a copy of the police report?” and so forth.

And there are so many good Coping Thoughts here! Like, even if the car had to stay just as it is now, that would be FINE. If it needed repair but we had to pay for it ourselves, we could do that and it would be FINE. Elizabeth is NOT HURT, and neither is the other driver. And imagine how much worse this whole thing would be if ELIZABETH were the one at fault in an accident less than a week after she got her driver’s license!! But she isn’t!! So everything is JUST FINE! COMPLETELY FINE!!

After work today I thought it might help to go on a little Therapeutic Shopping Trip. I have been gradually starting to do recreational shopping again—not MUCH, but SOME. I am especially enjoying reintroducing myself to HomeGoods and Marshalls and T.J. Maxx, with the treasure-hunt-style miscellany that makes for soothing browsing. Today I bought some more bowls (soup-size and side-dish-size; we break both kinds slowly but steadily), and some birthday cards, and a new towel (light purple, on a whim, to see if the boys like it as much as they like their light purple shirts). I bought some bags of Starbucks coffee on a nice-but-not-fabulous discount. I also bought Elizabeth a pair of tiny silver snake stud earrings for Christmas: awhile back she put a little silver snake ring on her wish list, and I had to admit it was cute, and these had a similar vibe, and also she’ll never need to worry that I’ll want to borrow them. I bought a mug with little rainbows all over it, even though I do not need any more mugs and in fact do not have room for any more mugs and in fact seriously need to get rid of some mugs to make space for any new mug.

I almost bought Christmas wrapping paper (I used the VERY LAST SCRAPS OF CHRISTMAS WRAPPING PAPER for First Pandemic Christmas, and in fact had to use some not-too-birthdayish birthday wrapping paper for the final gifts), but there was nothing I liked enough to override the Too Soon to Be Fun feeling. I almost bought cozy scrunchies that looked like they were made out of five different colors of chenille sweaters, but then I thought too much about whether or not middle-aged women who wore scrunchies the first time around could wear them the second time around, and HELL YEAH WE CAN AND MAY I ASK WHO IS GOING TO STOP US and anyway I should have bought the scrunchies. I almost bought bedsheets with little rainbows all over them, and maybe I should get those too when I go back for the chenille scrunchies—but it did seem very dumb to buy more sheets when I am trying to force myself to go through the boxes of extra bedding we have in storage, so maybe I will get the scrunchies but not the sheets. I almost bought a long cardigan sweater and I’m wondering if maybe I should go back and get it—but it was a L and I usually wear an XL, so even though it seemed to fit I was worried it would feel too snug, and I don’t like a sweater that’s too ON ME. I like to be IN a sweater and have it WARMLY AROUND me, but I don’t want it to feel it coating me too closely. The sweater should not be TRACING MY OUTLINE.

I am on Day 3 of a slump. At work yesterday, I was sitting on the floor to sort a shelf of books that were not in the right order, and it took a fair amount of effort not to just lie down right there on the nice cool industrial carpeting. Here is what my brain looks like:

• Elizabeth got her driver’s license. She is certain to be permanently injured and/or killed in a crash, and/or to permanently injure / kill someone else in a crash, and we will have to live with that forever; WHY do we let SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLDS drive CARS???? And the tracking device we put on her phone is not working—and I mean ACTUALLY not working, as in Paul is a computer person and could not get it to work, not as in “Oh, she claims it weirdly stops working when she leaves the house” or whatever.

• Afghanistan appears to be stopping education for girls, just on top of everything else they are doing to women. There is no way to pretend that kind of thing can’t happen here. It’s only within the last 100 years that women in the U.S. could vote, have credit cards in their own names, work after marriage, purchase birth control without a husband’s permission. Women still don’t get equal pay, and many don’t have equality even within their own homes. It is only VERY RECENTLY that there has been pushback over using “he” as gender-neutral. We’ve still LITERALLY NEVER HAD a female president, and that’s not something that is viewed the way it should be. Imagine if we’d had 45 female presidents in a row, never a single male president, and men barely noticed, and just talked hopefully about how neat it would be to have a female president someday. Imagine if until recently, men hadn’t been allowed to vote. Imagine if it used to be that men could only have a credit card if it was jointly held with a wife or mother; imagine if men had been expected to quit their jobs (teaching or nursing or secretarial work) when they had children. Imagine if up until RECENT MEMORY “she” had been considered a gender-neutral pronoun. Imagine if all of that was LESS THAN 100 YEARS AGO, and if one of the two main political parties was talking extensively about getting back to traditional family values.

• Rob is not coming home for Thanksgiving, and the reason he gave us (he gets carsick) seems flimsy. He doesn’t love us, probably, and will never come home again. This is going to be one of those stories where the grown child goes around talking about their Brave Estrangement from their parents, and meanwhile we are never going to know WHY. (In college, I stayed on campus for several holidays, never because of my parents, always for other reasons, and had a marvelous time. I spent one spring break alone in the campus apartment, watching TV, eating Dinty Moore stew and Reese’s peanut butter eggs, and dealing successfully with a bunch of essays/projects that had been stressing me out.)

• Republicans in Congress. And Democrats are bumbling around LETTING THEM, despite holding control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, so it is seeming likely that the ENTIRE SYSTEM is corrupt and unworkable.

• People who refuse to get the Covid-19 vaccine are clogging hospitals, so that people with other issues are dying because medical care is not available.

• The kid whose job it is to unload the dishwasher keeps leaving for school without emptying it. By the time they DO empty it, it’s typical for the counter over the dishwasher to be FULL of dirty dishes, which then I end up loading into the dishwasher—and then immediately running it again, because it’s full. I don’t want to have to ACTIVELY MANAGE things so that this doesn’t happen. I want everyone to just do their own stupid chores without ME taking on the task of MANAGING their stupid chores for them.

• It’s only, like, a year, if we’re lucky, until our 45th president starts actively running for the 2024 election and the media starts covering him again all the time. It’s already starting to creep back.

• We have some sort of self-proclaimed “First Amendment Rights activist” who is bothering us at the library. He is filming us and trying to bait us into telling him he isn’t allowed to—because apparently, he IS allowed to. He is also allowed to post those videos of us on YouTube, which he is indeed doing. Relatedly: a few years ago, a patron kept taking photos/videos of my co-worker’s butt as she was working (she was a page at the time, a job that requires a lot of bending over). She eventually called the police—who told her that because she worked in a public building, there was nothing that could be done, and she had to let a stranger continue to photograph/film her butt.

• I keep a tab open in my browser to a local newspaper’s obituaries section. There have been a whole bunch of deaths recently of people in their 40s and 50s. Only a couple of them have mentioned the cause of death.

• The list that goes around sometimes of all the celebrity men over the years who openly exploited young teenage girls and didn’t face any real consequences for that.

• That terrible guy? is apparently still in charge of the U.S. Postal Service? and is still actively making it worse??

• The headlines making a big deal about all the HELPERS (medical workers, police) who are being FIRED for REFUSING TO BE VACCINATED, instead of emphasizing that over 99% of that workforce has been vaccinated, and that MANY MANY PROFESSIONS have mandatory safety regulations/requirements/equipment. We do not allow surgeons to make their own decisions about washing their hands and wearing masks/gloves. We do not allow construction workers to make personal choices about helmets.

• The Covid-19 spread in schools. Worrying about my kids. Worrying about other people’s kids. Meanwhile people claiming that masks are “child abuse.”

Here is what I have tried so far:

• Eating plenty of food, with plenty of calories, because in our culture women learn that the ideal number of calories is zero and anything else is weakness/indulgence; and so sadness/despair can actually be hunger/malnourishment—an actual lack of the actual energy needed by the body/mind in order to function, let alone cope.

• Ice cream purchased/eaten in pints. Another lesson from our culture is that there is something intrinsically therapeutic about eating an entire pint of ice cream directly from the container. I am leaning right into that.

• Mugs of coffee, re-microwaved as many times as necessary to keep them nice and comfortingly hot on cold stressy hands.

• B-complex Stress, sure to help the situation in Afghanistan and the situations here at home.

• Flowers. It is not the glorious time of $2 bundles of daffodils, but the grocery store has $5 “here’s what we’ve got today” bouquets, and today it was one red rose, one pink gerbera daisy, a bunch of interesting lime-green button-looking things, one fern frond. Who even knows what is happening in North Korea, but a vase of flowers is not going to make things WORSE.

• Staying preventatively warm. When I get sad, I get chilly. When I am sad and chilly, I can’t get myself to move from where I’m sitting. All I need to do is walk to another part of the house and get a sweatshirt and some slippers! That would make things so much better! But no. I am too cold to move. I must stay miserable.

• Less time on Twitter, more time reading books in a rocking chair. But then I accidentally read a memoir about a young woman who was beaten and raped by one of her college professors over a period of several years, and how he was never prosecuted for that. So I need to refine this technique. I got out three fresh books: Anxious People by Fredrik Backman; Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey; and Even Better Brownies, by Mike Johnson.

I wasn’t going to bother posting about these things because they’re so small, but they just KEPT being so pleasing, which made me keep wanting to recommend them. And I thought it might be nice to recommend things that are in that small impulse-buy category, which is how I bought all of them.

I finally bought this NOPE mug:

I resisted it for a LONG time, because I have TOO MANY MUGS, and this mug is the standard/generic/advertising shape and I hardly ever reach for those, and it seemed like the equivalent of getting a mug with “LOL” or an emoji on it or something—but every single time I saw it, it struck me as appealing and funny. So I finally said “GAH it is only THREE DOLLARS, if I never use it I will just DONATE IT” and I put it in my cart—and I have used it almost every day since. (When it’s not available I generally choose my This Is Going Well mug, shown in this post but no longer available.) My only complaint is that it is printed on only one side.

Next. I found this $7 bowl set when looking for inexpensive bowls for Rob to bring to college: his roommates mentioned they were short on bowls and cups. And certainly, Rob could select and purchase such things himself. But he did not have any opinions, and did not find it fun to decide. And I love shopping, and find it soothing at stressful times such as preparing to take my irreplaceable children back to college during a pandemic. So anyway I was browsing. These are WAY too small for what he needed (I got these cheap/large ceramic cereal bowls for his apartment), but were PERFECT for what I needed, which is bowls that are just the right size to crack two eggs into and pour in a little cream and use a fork to scramble them up, without the egg sloshing over the side. (They claim to be cereal/pasta/soup/ramen bowls but absolutely not. They are cute snack bowls. You could put an appetizer-sized serving of soup in them at most.)

(image from Amazon.com)

The bowls say “Happy Time” on the inside of them, for no reason. Also, I am so charmed by the description, which says those animals are “elk.” But also-also, LOOK AT THE BOX THEY CAME IN:

It is flattish, with a little protective drawer insert that pulls out of the top and has compartments for the bowls. Elizabeth and I gazed at it for a moment, just taking it all in (MORE than $7 must have gone for the shipping and for this box), and then she said reverently “You could use that as a PURSE.”

Speaking of bowls, I finally bought this plastic bowl set even though I no longer have small children in the house:

(image from Target.com)

It’s just, every time I saw the little multicolored stack at Target, I WANTED TO BUY IT. And, as with the Nope Mug, eventually I thought, “IT IS WORTH THREE DOLLARS TO STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS.” And it turns out I use them all the time, and they are so pretty, and I love the way they look in the cabinet, and it is fun to choose which color to use, and each color enhances the other colors.

I have successfully dropped Rob back at his college. I told him I wanted to leave at 9:00 a.m. and we were on our way by 9:45, which is better than the year I said 9:00 and he wasn’t ready until noon. Progress.

On our way there, he realized he had forgotten:

• sheets
• comforter
• pillow
• shaving cream
• laundry detergent
• the frying pan he’d told his roommates he would bring
• which, as it turns out, he thought they wanted a baking pan rather than a frying pan
• so it’s just as well he forgot it
• and who knows what else he’ll realize over the next days/weeks he’s also forgotten

He is 22 years old, and I have made a CONSCIOUS EFFORT to gradually back off over the years, so that he will be ready to launch. When he was getting ready for his first year of college, I helped him make a list; the second year, I asked if he wanted me to print out a copy of the list; after that, I assumed he now HAD the list and/or knew he COULD HAVE the list, and/or could use that as a basis for his own list. The first year, I went over the list with him: “Do you have this? How about this? Did you pack that? It’s a good idea to have a separate little list for last-minute items”—but after that, I assumed he understood that method and could do it himself. This year is his FIFTH, and I did nothing except tell him what time we were leaving, because he is a grown adult and can manage his own life—and he forgot a whole CATEGORY of crucial things, and when I said “WHAT?? HOW??” he said it was hard to remember everything. I said “This is WHY I MAKE LISTS.” I didn’t just say that. We were driving at 65mph and he was trapped in the car with me and I had plenty of time, so I went on at some length, with examples.

The journey itself was…okay. Many of the rest stops were closed, which not only meant I had to plan more carefully, but also meant that the remaining rest stops were very crowded. There were signs everywhere saying face masks were REQUIRED indoors for all, REGARDLESS of vaccination status. About half of the people indoors were not wearing masks; even quite a few employees were unmasked. There was no enforcement of the mask policy at all. I heard a lot of coughing, including loud extended coughing sessions that would have caught my attention even in non-pandemic times. We used the restrooms as quickly as possible, then got food and took it outside to eat at our car.

The hotel, too, had large signs saying everyone must be masked indoors except when they were in their own rooms; the signs asked that guests consider their own safety, but also the safety of hotel staff, and of other guests. The hotel’s desk clerk, standing in front of one of those signs, was not masked. About half of the other guests I saw were unmasked. I saw several members of the cleaning staff; they were all masked. I left a big tip for housecleaning.

I usually like to go to the mall’s Food Court to get dinner (especially if I have kids with me, so we can all choose our own food and don’t have to agree on one place), and almost all of the Food Court restaurants were closed—not just closed for the night, but closed as in stripped of signs and everything inside. There was a pizza/subs place and a coffee-and-ice-cream place and the rest of it was empty and dark. It was unsettling and upsetting.

After I dropped off Rob and his stuff, I found I was very, very, very twitchy. I sometimes get pretty twitchy at that point of the process anyway, and I don’t know what it is—especially since I SO look forward to the time alone, and then there I am, my mission accomplished and hours of happy alone time stretching ahead of me, and that’s when sometimes I get a very unpleasant feeling. Long ago, when I was trying therapy, I described the feeling to a psychiatrist and she nodded and said “Panic,” and wrote me a prescription. So I guess it’s panic. But WHY panic, is the question. When I was describing it to the therapist, it had been happening at a similar sort of time: I’d arrange to leave my small children with their father and go out for some time by myself, and I’d be out by myself, and instead of feeling wonderful and free I would feel like everything was scary and full of potential doom, and the store would feel eerie/creepy and as if something bad were about to happen, and the light felt wrong both indoors and out, and I would feel skittery and unhappy and heart-poundy and I would just want to GET OUT OF THERE and get back home. Which as you can imagine is very discouraging if you have been just about PERISHING for some alone time and you finally get some and then you hate it.

Anyway, it still sometimes happens. I’d thought it might happen this time in particular, since I knew I’d already be a little pre-twitchy with pandemic-related things. I wish I’d thought to bring along one of the several take-as-needed medications I’ve hoarded since that time in therapy, but I hadn’t. (NEXT TIME IT WILL BE ON MY LIST.) Instead I tried the 4-7-8 yoga breathing, but the holding-my-breath segment made me feel frantic so I stopped that, and instead talked quietly and kindly to myself (easier with a mask, where it’s harder for other people to tell you’re doing it): “You’re fine. You’re fine! This is all completely fine. Nothing is wrong, and everything is fine. This is the feeling of panic, but it is panic on its own, with nothing scary happening to cause it. You thought you might feel weird like this, and you do, and you know from experience that soon you will not feel this way anymore. Let’s get you some dinner to take back to your nice comfy hotel room, and you can watch some HGTV while you eat and won’t THAT be nice! No, don’t just flee to the hotel room: I think dinner is going to be helpful.”

This is unfortunately when I drove to the Food Court to get some familiar comforting teriyaki chicken and rice, and found that place had gone out of business, as had all the other Food Court places where I like to get food. I went instead through the drive-through of a Taco Bell (the first familiar place I saw), chose pink lemonade as my drink (I love their pink lemonade, and I thought it would provide Comfort and Cheer as well as Hydration), took everything back up to my hotel room, turned on the TV, and tried to settle in. By the time I’d watched part of an episode of House Hunters (it was the one where SHE wants a charming fixer-upper with character and HE wants something brand-new with high ceilings, and he says something like “she has a lot of strong opinions about what she wants, but I want to make sure it’s a place that’s right for BOTH of us,” and so they compromise on…the place that is exactly what he wants, with nothing of what she wants, where in fact she specifically STATES that it is as if the agent chose it exclusively for him but with nothing for her, and in short I suggest she get out of this before they have kids), and eaten most of my familiar comforting food, and consumed the entire pink lemonade and refilled it with water and had some of that as well (I didn’t drink enough during the day, because I didn’t want to have to stop at too many rest areas), I was feeling okay again, and had a nice evening watching TV and eating candy.

Oh! An audiobook report! Thank you SO MUCH for all your recommendations—that is going to be an EXCELLENT reference for future trips, too. I made a list of the ones that sounded most likely, and then from those I selected what happened to be available on the shelf of my library: I picked a Maeve Binchy as planned, plus a David Sedaris, plus the John Green Anthropocene thing. I let Rob pick what he wanted to listen to on the way there, and he picked the David Sedaris, and we listened to the first part of three or four segments and then gave up on it. I’d made the mistake of choosing the “best of” one, and apparently David Sedaris’s own favorites (at least on the first disc) are the ones I skip/skim in his books: fake newsletters, fake Christmas card letters, fake reviews. My favorites are his real-life stories about his real life/family. I will choose better next time, and/or look ahead at what’s on which disc so I know which discs to listen to.

On the way home, I tried the John Green one and thought it was PERFECT for a road trip: interesting, soothing, no big deal if I don’t listen to the whole thing on one single trip. I listened to the first two discs, and then tried to put the third disc in, and the CD player said there was already a disc in there but failed to spit it out when I pressed eject (because there WAS NO disc in there), and I tried a bunch of different things (AFTER PULLING OVER of course) and nothing worked, and the CD player kept saying it was trying to read a disc that wasn’t in there, so then I had to listen to the radio for the rest of the trip, which is normally fine and I enjoy it, but this time I was comparing it to what I WANTED to be doing, which was to be listening to more of the John Green thing.

Well! It was fine! It was all fine! I am home safe and sound, and not at all fretting irritably about what else Rob might have forgotten to bring, or imagining that I feel my throat getting sort of…coughish.

We have taken William back to his college, and he is settling in. I was first very stressed (as we prepared for him to go), then a combination of stressed and bereft (when he was nearly leaving and then leaving and then recently gone), then mostly just bereft (in the two or three days after he left), and now I feel just the mild background stressed/bereft of having one of my babies out in the world where I can’t see them. I am mostly glad he can be back at school, and that he is glad to be back at school. (And that his school is requiring Covid-19 vaccinations among the many other vaccinations they already required, plus masks indoors, plus weekly testing for all staff and students.)

This weekend I will take Rob back to HIS college. (Rob’s college is also requiring Covid-19 vaccinations among the many other vaccinations they already required, plus masks indoors. I can’t remember what they’re requiring for testing.) It’s been a long time, but you may remember I LOVE driving Rob to/from his school, because I consider it the perfect length for a road-trip: about 7 hours of driving each way, and I stay in a hotel overnight by myself in between. I bring a big box of snacks, and I watch HGTV in the hotel, and I have a very nice time. I will have to make some pandemic modifications to the trip (for example, I would love to eat a big restaurant breakfast in the morning, but I am not yet eating at indoor restaurants), but I think it will still be fun.

As I was working at the library this morning, I realized I will be driving a car that has a working CD player; this was not the case in the past. This means I could consider an AUDIOBOOK for the drive. But I have literally never checked out an audiobook before. I am hoping to rely on our group experience for recommendations.

Here is what I would like: I’m not sure. I think I’d prefer fiction, but maybe not. I considered just checking out a Maeve Binchy, since I know I like her books and I like that kind of real-life drama. But maybe I need something even a little more dramatic than that? Maeve Binchy can be kind of peaceful, and I need to stay alert. I don’t want anything scary or gory; it can be dramatic/tense/suspenseful, but it shouldn’t make me nervous to be alone in a hotel room, or jumpy about weird sounds. I don’t usually like classic murder/dectective-type mysteries: I have trouble keeping track of lots of clues/details, and I don’t like to try to figure things out. Rob will be with me in the car for half of the trip, so NOTHING RACY.

Here are a few books on my To Read list that my library also has on audiobook, if anyone happens to be able to report on any of these:

In Five Years, by Rebecca Searle
The 7-1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow
The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel

I am in one of those little interludes where it seems every person in my household is enmeshed in at least one stressful situation, and where most of those situations include a high level of uncertainty. I sometimes have dreams where I am driving a car but there is no friction, so the car is on the road but gliding along disconcertingly smoothly, as if on ice. Usually in the dream I don’t do much scary sliding; the scariness is more from feeling like the sliding could/will start at any moment, especially if I were to attempt to use the brakes in any way, and oh dear now we’re going down a steep hill, and maybe it will be fine or maybe I will plunge smoothly off that cliff to the right. I keep being reminded of the feeling of that dream.

I was going to list all the stressful things, but that’s already how I’m spending my 3:00 a.m.; and also, I know it would cause some of you to experience uncomfortable empathetic stress. Still, I’m going to list SOME of them. I’m going to try to do it BRIEFLY [proofreading note: why do I even attempt such a thing?], and I’m going to lean heavily on the ones that have mostly been resolved and are therefore now down to the final little stress tendrils.

1. William needed college housing for one semester. (He’ll be doing an internship second semester. This is another source of stress, since we don’t know what/where it will be, or what kind of housing he’ll need.) The college did not have enough housing to go around, and William did not even make it onto the waiting list. His college is in a big city. He had to somehow find housing for (1) just four months (2) and in a pandemic (3) and in a housing crisis (4) and in a big city. Time grew shorter and shorter, and many options were truly terrible (e.g., he found a place, but he’d have to take on a 12-month lease, and pay for the 8 extra months if he couldn’t find someone to take over the lease), and we didn’t know what he’d do if he COULDN’T find housing, and it seemed amazing that he might have to literally drop out of college for a semester because of not being able to find a place to live, but that also seemed to be the direction we were headed. Anyway he DID find a place. Now we’re down to the smaller stressors, like how are we going to get some furniture and kitchen stuff to that unfurnished apartment in a big city with no parking, and what furniture / kitchen stuff should that be, and what day should he go, and GAH how can a windowless basement bedroom with four other people sharing the bathroom/kitchen be the same price as our MORTGAGE payment (okay our mortgage payment from 20 years ago BUT STILL) but it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s only for four months, and this is a pandemic housing crisis and things cost what they cost, and at least we are not paying for TWELVE months.

2. Rob is back home, and would prefer not to be, and is also having trouble finding housing—but at least in this case he CAN do his semester remotely, it would just be BETTER if he could get nearer to it and do some of it in person—so we’re not working with a time deadline, or with the collapse of his plans. But there have still been a lot of stressy conversations/plans/attempts: he’s mostly handling it himself, but he wants to vent to me about it, and also there are things he wants/needs to run past me, and so on. BUT: today he got a very encouraging update that looks as if he may actually be able to get actual college housing and maybe everything is going to work out great. (After seeing what was involved in acquiring non-college housing for William, I have freshly and fervently renewed appreciation for the relative ease of college housing.) It’s not a done deal yet, so we are not counting on it, but it is an encouraging development. I was SO HOPING that what made sense to me (i.e., that there might be some little empty slots in college housing for various reasons, and that the college would be very motivated to fill those slots with paying students, and that after the start of the semester there might not be very many students competing for those slots) seems to be the case for Rob’s college. AND: if this DOES work out, I get a nice little road trip, which I would LOVE. (You might think I’d be too stressed about pandemic stuff to enjoy it, but I feel I can decrease risks pretty substantially while still having a nice time.)

3. There was a whole huge thing involving work needing to be done on our car, and Paul trying to handle that for me because I was so stressed about everything else—and instead he inadvertently made things so much worse, and in such a bizarre/nonsensical/ridiculous way as if we were in some sort of clown sitcom, that I involuntarily near-shouted “ARE! YOU! KIDDING! ME!” with incredulous dismay and then sat in silent incredulous overwhelming despair for half an hour, wondering if there was any way at all to fix it other than going out and impulse-buying a new car. But then all of it self-resolved as if by divine intervention: the main issue he had solved in such an unworkable way ended up no longer being an issue, so then everything else untangled itself.

4. Edward needed an MRI. It’s been such an ordeal each time; and last time he managed to get most of the gross prep fluid down and then he threw it up; and getting medical procedures done is so much more stressful in a pandemic. Also, it meant a long drive to a big city. But it’s done now, and also he got a technician who remembered him from last time, and who corrected the receptionist when she said he had to drink one bottle of prep fluid in 15 minutes and then two cups of water in the next 15 minutes and then a second bottle of prep fluid in the 15 minutes after that, so instead he was instructed to drink one bottle in 30 minutes, then have just a little bit of water, only as much as he wanted to drink, and then to “just do what you can” with the second bottle—which he found so encouraging/comforting that he ended up drinking more than half of it, when I would have predicted he would interpret “just do what you can” as permission to drink two sips and be done. And he was NOT queasy and did NOT throw up.

5. Elizabeth realized she is not willing to do gym class in a mask when everyone is breathing hard and no one else is wearing masks including the teacher, so she needs to drop the class. (She signed up for it on the assumption that everyone would be masked, as they were last year, but our school system has buckled under pressure from parents and is not requiring masks even for staff.) She further realized that her required math class is somehow not on her schedule. And the guidance office recently sent a weary email to all parents/students saying schedule changes are pretty much not happening this year, so please don’t email asking about changes, and that is a real hurdle for rule-following people-pleasers, but Elizabeth is going to have to attempt it. There are numerous other issues/complications here, and I have no idea how they’re going to pan out. But she wrote a good email, and now we wait.

6. While helping Elizabeth deal with her scheduling situation, I realized that FOR SURE Edward would need to drop gym because it is not safe for HIM to be around people who are unvaccinated and breathing hard and not wearing masks—which is when we discovered it is somehow not on his schedule. It is a required class, so there is no reason it would not be on his schedule. On one hand, this is convenient: I don’t have to deal with it right now. On the other hand, the school’s errors are piling up in a way that feels alarming. Their guidance counselor is new as of spring 2021 when the school system required all staff to be personally in the school building again even if not necessary for their jobs, and 30% of the staff quit.

7. The three younger kids started school. I am still prepared/preparing to yank them out. Approximately 10% of students are wearing masks, and 50% of their teachers are wearing them at least part of the time (some teachers take them off when they’re up at the front of the room, but put them on if they’re going to circulate among the students); the principal and vice principal were not wearing masks. Lunch is indoors and normal: not distanced in any way, no outdoors option. The administration sent out an email informing parents that large fans will be provided to every classroom to “increase air circulation.” THAT IS EXACTLY THE WRONG KIND OF AIR CIRCULATION. Also they are still talking about washing hands and disinfecting surfaces as if it is spring of 2020 and we don’t yet know the problem is the AIR. I mean, hand-washing and surface-disinfecting are good! Let’s for sure keep doing those for many OTHER reasons! But that is not the “addressing the Covid-19 issue” they seem to think it is. On the VERY FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL we got an email alerting us to a positive case, with the reassuring information that they would clean and disinfect the school as usual. Wow great!

8. I needed new glasses. I was very fretful about the entire thing, especially since one of the pandemic adjustments our eye-doctor has made is “guided browsing”—i.e., they bring you a selection of glasses, and you are not allowed to search on your own. (They will keep bringing you more and more glasses if you want them to, but I knew my own personal ability to ask them to do that would be low.) And you must wear a mask, so how would I even be able to tell if I liked the glasses or not? And glasses are SO EXPENSIVE, and the pricing is so exploitive. (I do like/use Zenni Optical! But I am finding it overwhelming to think of dealing with that right now, and wanted to get at least one pair at the eye-doctor’s office.) So I was very stressed. But now it is over and I have chosen/ordered glasses, and I also asked how much it would be to replace the lenses in my current well-loved frames, so if I hate the new glasses I will just clench my teeth at the wasted money and wear the new glasses while waiting for new lenses to be put in my old frames.

9. Paul is experiencing kidney stones. And I AM very sympathetic: it sounds like it’s pretty dreadful. But is not possible for you to overestimate how often I am receiving Kidney Stone Updates from him, nor how often he says “oof” and “phwoo” and “ow ow ow.” At one point I actually had to leave the house for a little while.

Our school district starts later than many, so I have been watching as other school districts open up and then bad things happen with Covid-19. I keep hoping our school system will watch this too, and make changes, but no. In fact, our school district has recently released their Final Version Covid-19 plan, which is to wait for the horse to get out, and then to start closing the barn door afterward (but only in increments). There’s a whole color-coded chart. We will start in Stage One, which is leaving the barn door open: vaccination will be optional for everyone including staff, mask-wearing will optional for everyone including staff, and there will be no distancing at all, and no precautions of any kind. The next step up, Stage Two, is “When the horse gets out”: at that point, we will have vaccinations/masks optional for everyone, and no distancing or precautions—but the stripe on the chart will be a DIFFERENT COLOR. The next step up from that, Stage Three, is “Horse is trampling more than x% of the population,” at which point vaccines/masks will be optional for everyone, and we will make sure people “social-distance” to 3+ feet apart. When the horse is trampling an even larger part of the population (Stage Four), vaccines/masks will still be optional for everyone, and we will distance to 6+ feet apart you guys!!!—which they told us last year was impossible to do, given the space limitations of our school building, so I am not sure how they plan to do this. The next step up from that is Stage Five: full remote learning. The stripe is PINK!! to show the danger!! There is no stage at which masks will be required for anyone.

You will not be surprised to hear that our school district has a large/active/vocal group of parents campaigning against ALL preventative measures, arguing that “Our kids have gone through enough!”—as if that type of argument is relevant in any way to this sort of situation. “Stop preventing kids from swapping hats in the lice outbreak! This outbreak has gone on too long, and our kids have been through enough! We need to get back to normal now!” “Three days of antibiotics for this pneumonia is ENOUGH, and the breathing treatments are traumatic! It’s time to stop living in fear!” “We’ve been aiming a hose at this fire for hours and the fire still isn’t out but we’re tired of this! Let’s turn off the hose and give everyone a much needed rest!” “People who need continuing treatments for long-term/chronic health conditions have had enough and shouldn’t have to go through any more! They can’t get back to normal unless they stop those treatments!” Or as Becky put it: “My kid was in a car seat for the first half of this trip. They have been immobilized enough! Let the kids move and stretch! No one has been hurt! Time to let my kid move around the car unhampered.”

I have, as you know, a child with a medically-suppressed immune system. There is a new recommendation that certain groups, including his group, should get a third Covid-19 shot, in part because it seems the vaccine does not always “take” in people with compromised immune systems. This is something that happened with his chicken pox vaccine, incidentally: he received both shots, but the vaccine did not take: it is exactly as if he did not get the vaccine. So he relies on herd immunity for chicken pox. Luckily (the doctor mentioned that for him chicken pox would almost certainly result in a nice long hospitalization) there has not been a huge outbreak of chicken pox, since most parents in our area get their children the recommended vaccines—or rather they DID do that, before the Covid-19 vaccine was recommended.

It has felt as if there is no way to make a decision here, since things have been changing so rapidly—but now we are in our final days for choice-making. The national/international pandemic news is worse every day, and yet the parents in our district are ramping up their “We need to MOVE FORWARD now!!” messaging, saying that no one should have to take even the smallest, easiest, most effective precautions, and that they only good option for kids is for things to be NORMAL—as if “normal” were a valid and chooseable option that the rest of us were rejecting for no reason. And the school seems to agree with them, and also is not offering any remote-learning option, so our choices are: send him to school, knowing he might be just the same as if he were unvaccinated, except also with a compromised immune system (a sinus infection two years ago landed him in the hospital for five days and then another two days, and included two separate surgeries), where he will be surrounded by students who are unvaccinated and unmasked—or else…figure out something else, for his junior year of high school, which is the one that at least until recently has been considered one of the most important for college. …Which would of course seem trivial if he were to end up intubated in the hospital, or worse.

I found your comments on the last post exceedingly reassuring and helpful—and I hope others in similarly financially-dependent situations found the comments section similarly reassuring. I found it helpful on so many levels. The reminder that there WOULD BE some money, and some time to figure things out. The stories about others who were financially dependent, and then had to and/or wanted to change that, and were able to. The specific ideas for classes/careers that might be good options. The reminder that there are quite a few of us in this situation, and HAVE BEEN quite a few of us in this situation, and that we, like so many before us, would figure something out, and that we don’t necessarily have to figure something out PREVENTATIVELY (though it wouldn’t be weird to do so, either, if we wanted to for other reasons).

It’s been awhile since I’ve written a pandemic-themed post. I’ve stopped marking the number of weeks of pandemic lockdown on the calendar, because we are no longer locked down: we are going to routine medical/dental appointments; we are going to work; we are seeing vaccinated friends and family. (Elizabeth’s sleepover went well!) I’m gradually using up the extra groceries and seeing space open up again in the cabinets and freezer. My intention is to send the children to in-person school in the fall, though at least one friend has chosen to homeschool for the stability of not having to wonder what might happen, and I wonder if later this will seem prescient.

I don’t have any kind of “the pandemic is over” feeling, only a feeling of “this is at least a temporary respite, and we should make a good effort to get caught up on things while we can”: routine appointments, new glasses, dental work, an updated MRI for Edward. I’m still wearing a mask into stores, though very few other people are; I avoid making eye contact with them, so that they won’t think I am thinking they should be wearing masks (I am thinking they should be wearing masks) and get confrontational about it.

I have seen others saying that they feel the way they felt in February/March of 2020, as things were starting to Look Scary, and that is roughly how I feel, though of course with differences all over the place: there is a vaccine now; we have some experience in what lockdown is like; we know how to use Zoom; we own masks; we know that a certain percentage of our community thinks pandemics are nothing to worry about, which is why this one is not over and can’t be over. I am trying not to overindulge in news, but I listen to the NPR briefing each morning, and the news about the Delta variant is not cheery. They had someone on the other day who said we can expect things to get pretty bad again this fall/winter. “Mostly for unvaccinated people,” these stories often add, as if we don’t all know and love some unvaccinated people. As if we have forgotten that people under 12 years old are unvacccinated people. As if schools and daycares, under pressure to go back to normal this fall, are not full of unvaccinated people.

Elizabeth is having a friend (just one) sleep over this weekend. She cleaned her already-clean room, and is now walking around the house with a broom and dustpan; as she passed my chair she reported that she cleaned the sinks and shower in the kid bathroom (I have already promised to clean the toilet). Our house has been pretty clean ever since we moved (I felt like the move was a clear opportunity to start over and not let things get as out of hand as they did in the years of Small Children, so even when the cleaners weren’t coming during the pandemic I was very motivated to keep up with it), so I wonder if this is House Embarrassment (like, Elizabeth’s cleaning standards are higher, so she feels the state of our house is a little embarrassing), or if it’s just the sort of nervous pre-cleaning any adult might do before a friend came over. I try NOT to do that anymore, because I feel so relieved and happy if I go to someone’s house and it’s not very clean/tidy, so I assume others would feel that way coming into MY house, but I do recognize the urge. But I don’t remember EVER cleaning up for a friend when I was in HIGH SCHOOL.

This is a newish friend, too, and I think that increases the nervousness. Plus, Elizabeth and I are both a little skittery about the pandemic still, even though the friend is vaccinated and if anything is even MORE skittery/cautious than we are. I listen to NPR each morning, and the Delta variant sounds pretty bad. Well, we won’t think about that right now. We will think how nice it is to be doing at least SOME social things, and how we can use the sleepover as a reason to order pizza and make ice cream sundaes. (I also bought Oreos, ice cream sandwiches, snack cakes. Be the adult you needed as a child.)

Another fun thing about this friend is that she’s an only child with calm quiet parents. Elizabeth went to her house and said it was like three adult roommates living quietly together. I think this has the potential to go either way: the friend may find our household (packed with people and especially with brothers; and Paul is LOUD and LAUGHY and a SHOUT-SNEEZER) delightful, or she may find us overwhelming. Well, they can retreat to Elizabeth’s nice clean quiet room.

My delayed-mammogram results came back fine, as did my delayed-pap results, as did all my delayed bloodwork. Before the pandemic, I was going to the dentist every 3 months to try to keep my gum pockets from getting worse; because of the pandemic I went 16 months between cleanings/checks, and the gum pockets were exactly the same, and I needed only the usual amount of scraping with metal tools, and both the hygienist and the dentist commented that they would never have known from the state of my teeth/gums that it had been so long, so now I’m going to go every 6 months instead of every 3, and I expect this will improve the quality of my life.

Henry failed one of his finals, and this class requires a C in the class (he had this) and also on the final (he did not have this) in order to go on, which means he has to repeat the entire thing next year, and we’ve struggled all year to make him do it FOR NOTHING. It’s fine. It’s fine! He’ll just be a year behind in math, that’s all. GAH THIS SCHOOL YEAR. Well, it’s over. We have made and consumed our end-of-year ice cream sundaes, and now we can turn our minds toward summer.

IN FACT LET’S TALK ABOUT SUMMER. The kids (probably just the three youngest) and I will soon have our annual conversation about our summer plans, and in recent years our summer plans have consistently involved doing something academic and/or creative each day, so that we now just call it Our Academic-Creative, so I assume we will be doing it again this summer, and have been thinking ahead to what I want to do: this year I want to read some of the HEAPS of interesting non-fiction I see when I am shelving at the library. There is so much of it, I am having trouble narrowing it down at all.

One possibility is history. I am so poor at learning/retaining history, I have many embarrassing gaps. I could read about some Major Event. Like the Russian revolution in the early 1900s, which I had to find out a little about while reading A Gentleman in Moscow. Or the Berlin wall thing, or The Cold War, which I don’t know anything about and/or if they are related. Or I could read some sort of overview of United States history, or some sort of One Hundred Things Everyone Should Know About World History / Things You May Have Missed in History Class book. It can’t be DRY or too TEXTBOOKY: it needs to be written for people who are not ordinarily interested in history and need to be persuaded.

Another possibility is politics. Again, I have many embarrassing gaps: frankly, I didn’t really tune in until 2015. I could read about some of the most recent presidents. But again: I need something written in a sort of LIVELY, even GOSSIPY, trying-to-make-it-really-interesting way.

It might be fun, and also easier for my poor brain to absorb, to combine a non-fiction book with a TV show and/or fiction book. I could re-watch The Crown, and then read a book about Queen Elizabeth or Prince Philip or Prince Charles or Princess Anne or whoever. I could watch a documentary about the George W. Bush administration, if such a thing exists, and then re-read Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife, and then read a non-fiction book about George W. Bush, and then maybe read something one of his daughters wrote. I could choose one of Philippa Gregory’s historical fictions, and then read some non-fiction about those same people.

Another possibility is travel. I could pick a country I’d like to visit someday, and study up on it. Though I think that might be more fun to do once travel plans have actually been made.

Or what about some sort of group project with the kids?? We could do Four Recent Presidents, and each take one and report to each other each day on what new things we’ve learned! Or we could do Four Major World Events! Or Elizabeth wonders if they might all like to study sign language together, and William said he’d be inclined to join that—though I’d opt out, since I have already started sign language several times and always lose interest, and the thought of re-re-re-learning the alphabet fills me with ennui.

Well, what do you think? What would you read, if you were me? / What are you going to do for YOUR Academic Creative this summer? Do you have any engaging non-fiction books to recommend? Ooo, or do you already have a strong interest in a particular topic, so that you would be able to recommend a little mini-course containing a non-fiction book AND a fiction book AND a documentary AND a TV show set in that time period AND…etc.??